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When You Stop Forcing, Things Actually Move
Welcome to the After-Launch Party 🎉
The book is out, Being Is the New Doing is in the world. I wanted to celebrate that the way that feels most true to me with real conversations with people whose work I genuinely admire, and whose lives are — each in their own way — a living proof of what this book is about.
So this is the After-Launch Party. Five lives. Five conversations.
Being Is the New Doing is built around the acronym FLUIDE — six dimensions of an aligned life and business: Foundations, Liberation, Unicity, Intuition, Deployment, and Evolution. This conversation touches all six, but it lands most deeply in the “U” — Unicity — Your energy, your nervous system, your design, your relationship to your own true rhythm.
I invited Iva G. Biz + Human Design because I worked with me last year, and because what she does is rare: she uses Human Design, psychosomatic work, and story selling as one integrated system. A business that feels good isn’t a luxury in her world. It’s the point. And she lives that. From the outside, people look at her and say: you’re doing so much. She says: I don’t feel like it. Because when it’s your passion, it isn’t effort. That’s exactly what Being Is the New Doing is about.
The Awakened Entrepreneur is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free subscriber or paid subscriber and access to my Monthly Circle
[00:03:21 — 00:06:25]
Iva discovered Human Design eight years ago. Like most of us, she read her chart, found it interesting, and dropped it. A year later she came back, this time with the intention to actually live it — starting with her authority, then her centers, then the gates inside the centers. Eight years of that, she says, is exactly the seven-year deconditioning cycle Human Design talks about. Your cells regenerate. Your body resets. You get, literally, a new system.
But the real turning point was a December she decided to use as an experiment. No motivation, no inspiration, nothing she wanted to do. So instead of pushing, she gave herself an entire month to act only from her design — from her sacral yes and no, from her emotional authority. Wake up: do I want to get out of bed or stay in? Do I want to read or scroll? No overriding. No “I should.” Just following the pull.
That month, Clubhouse launched. She felt a strong pull toward it, unusual for her. She started hosting live conversations. Clients came in. Opportunities followed. A collaboration with one of the biggest Human Design creators on YouTube. Offers launched from pure enthusiasm, no plan, no course built in advance. $9,000 in a week. Not because she forced anything. Because she finally stopped.
The difference between using Human Design and living it
[00:10:06 — 00:10:45]
There’s a version of Human Design that’s mental — you know your type, your profile, your “it factor,” and you use it to inform your content strategy. Iva used it that way for years. It works on that level, she says. But it’s not the same as feeling it from inside your body.
The shift is from doing Human Design to being it. From “this is my it factor, I’ll show it through my content” to “there is a pull in my body right now, something that wants to move, and I’m going to follow it without needing to understand why.” That second version is what changed everything for her. Not the knowledge. The embodiment.
And that, she says, is exactly what the title of your book means. Being is not passive. It’s not the absence of doing. It’s the condition from which the right doing becomes possible — and feels completely different from the inside.
The fear gate, goal trauma, and EFT tapping
[00:15:50 — 00:22:25]
Human Design gave Iva a map, but the map also showed her the blocks. Gate 44 in her spleen center — the fear of the past repeating itself. In business, this translates directly: every time you’ve set a goal and missed it, every time something went badly, you carry that unprocessed experience forward. It becomes a weight on every future attempt. She calls it goal trauma.
She survived two wars. Lost her father at 12. There was, she says simply, a lot of stuff there. And Human Design helped her see exactly where those experiences were living in her energetic structure and why they were creating specific patterns in her business behavior.
The tool she used to clear it: EFT tapping. Not as a concept, as a daily practice. In EFT, you go through a round of venting first — all the swear words, all the “this is not fair,” all of it — and only after the emotion is fully expressed does the neutralization become possible. This is precisely what Human Design prescribes for emotional authority: act from neutrality. But you can’t get to neutrality by thinking your way there. You have to move through the emotion somatically, not manage it mentally.
The plane above the hurricane
[00:25:34 — 00:27:10]
Iva described a moment that I found precise enough to keep exactly as she said it. She’d received bad news. She was spiraling. She started pacing around her kitchen doing circular breathwork — the conscious connected breath she’d learned from a coach. Within 90 seconds — the time it takes an emotion to leave the body if you don’t cling to it — something shifted.
Before: a plane in the hurricane. After: a plane above it. The clouds are still there. The difficult situation hasn’t changed. But her emotional state is completely neutral. Detached. Able to observe. And from that place, she can actually think.
This is not a metaphor for bypassing. It’s the opposite. You go through the emotion with the breath, not around it. The nervous system regulation opens the parts of the brain that dysregulation shuts down. Creativity, discernment, decision-making — all of it comes back online. And this, she says, is the only state from which you can make good decisions. Because all of your resources are available.
Why breath is the tool nobody teaches us
[00:23:59 — 00:27:27]
Both of us said the same thing in different words: the breath is a superpower and nobody teaches us this. It should be in schools. It takes three minutes, works on the vagus nerve, regulates the nervous system, and costs nothing.
I added my own version: I wake up sometimes with a contraction right here, between the solar plexus and the heart, in the sternum. Three minutes of alternate nostril breathing and it’s gone. Not suppressed — gone. And from there I can start my emails, my sessions, my day, from somewhere that actually feels like me.
Iva’s version is sharper: procrastination, bad decisions, fear and doubt — all of these come from a dysregulated nervous system. Regulate it, and everything else gets easier. Not because the problems disappear, but because you’re meeting them with all of your capacity rather than a fraction of it.
Mirror work, radical self-acceptance, and the face that doesn’t lie
[00:32:54 — 00:34:14]
Iva’s other practice is mirror work. She started it practically by necessity — living alone in Toronto, sometimes weeks without seeing anyone in person, she started talking to herself in the mirror. Dancing with herself. And from that came something she hadn’t expected: radical self-honesty.
Your eyes don’t lie. Your face doesn’t lie. You can tell yourself whatever story you want, but when you look at yourself — really look — your face tells you what’s actually true.
I shared my own version of this. Last week, after the book launch, I looked at myself in the mirror. I expected to feel thrilled. I wasn’t sure what I felt. And in the mirror I saw it: deeply satisfied. Proud. And a little ashamed to admit it, because there’s something in us that hesitates to claim satisfaction outright, like we’re not supposed to be pleased with ourselves. The mirror caught it before I could qualify it. That recognition, Iva says, changes something in the cells. I believe her.
Human Design as a certification to be yourself
[00:31:01 — 00:32:00]
One of the lines from this conversation that I keep turning over: Human Design gives you permission — a certification, she called it — to be yourself. To stop comparing your energy, your rhythm, your pace to someone else’s and wondering why you can’t keep up.
She has an undefined root center. Not consistently driven. A homebody by nature. She loves what she calls soft business — no hustle, no burning through energy in ways that deplete. Someone else, with a defined root center, thrives on exactly that intensity. Neither is wrong. But knowing which one you are, and stopping the shame about it, is the beginning of everything.
Comparison, she says, can be the thief of joy. But it can also be a source of it — when you use it as information rather than judgment. When you watch someone else’s system and recognize: she has this and I don’t. This path is hers, not mine. And from that recognition, you stop borrowing blueprints and start building from your own design.
What being actually produces
[00:53:22 — 00:55:51]
Iva closed the conversation with something I want to keep as a kind of compass. She said: when you start from being — when you start with your nervous system, with honoring yourself, with that foundation — everything else comes from that. The launch becomes easier. The content ideas keep coming because you’re in a creative state. The offers take shape because you know what you actually want. And on top of that, all the tools and tactics and strategies fit — because there’s a real foundation under them.
The version that doesn’t work: you start with the strategy, the launch plan, the marketing calendar, and try to find the energy to execute it from a system that’s already dysregulated. The doing is all there. The being is absent. And it feels like exactly what it is: pushing.
She said something else at the end that stayed with me: with AI changing faster than social media algorithms used to, we need a nervous system that can shift fast. We need to be able to make aligned decisions from a secure inner place — because otherwise everything we do depletes us and drives us straight into the wall. The external world is moving too fast for rigidity to work. The only stable ground is the one inside.
So here’s what I’m leaving you with:
Where in your business are you currently pushing — and underneath that push, what are you afraid would stop if you let go of the force? And what if that thing actually moved faster without it?
Follow Iva G. Biz + Human Design and her work on soft business and Human Design.
Being Is the New Doing is available on Amazon: https://a.co/d/08gxk9ct
Valérie
The Awakened Entrepreneur is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber and access to my Monthly Circle
Get full access to The Awakened Entrepreneur at demontvalerie.substack.com/subscribe
View all episodes
By Valerie DemontWelcome to the After-Launch Party 🎉
The book is out, Being Is the New Doing is in the world. I wanted to celebrate that the way that feels most true to me with real conversations with people whose work I genuinely admire, and whose lives are — each in their own way — a living proof of what this book is about.
So this is the After-Launch Party. Five lives. Five conversations.
Being Is the New Doing is built around the acronym FLUIDE — six dimensions of an aligned life and business: Foundations, Liberation, Unicity, Intuition, Deployment, and Evolution. This conversation touches all six, but it lands most deeply in the “U” — Unicity — Your energy, your nervous system, your design, your relationship to your own true rhythm.
I invited Iva G. Biz + Human Design because I worked with me last year, and because what she does is rare: she uses Human Design, psychosomatic work, and story selling as one integrated system. A business that feels good isn’t a luxury in her world. It’s the point. And she lives that. From the outside, people look at her and say: you’re doing so much. She says: I don’t feel like it. Because when it’s your passion, it isn’t effort. That’s exactly what Being Is the New Doing is about.
The Awakened Entrepreneur is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free subscriber or paid subscriber and access to my Monthly Circle
[00:03:21 — 00:06:25]
Iva discovered Human Design eight years ago. Like most of us, she read her chart, found it interesting, and dropped it. A year later she came back, this time with the intention to actually live it — starting with her authority, then her centers, then the gates inside the centers. Eight years of that, she says, is exactly the seven-year deconditioning cycle Human Design talks about. Your cells regenerate. Your body resets. You get, literally, a new system.
But the real turning point was a December she decided to use as an experiment. No motivation, no inspiration, nothing she wanted to do. So instead of pushing, she gave herself an entire month to act only from her design — from her sacral yes and no, from her emotional authority. Wake up: do I want to get out of bed or stay in? Do I want to read or scroll? No overriding. No “I should.” Just following the pull.
That month, Clubhouse launched. She felt a strong pull toward it, unusual for her. She started hosting live conversations. Clients came in. Opportunities followed. A collaboration with one of the biggest Human Design creators on YouTube. Offers launched from pure enthusiasm, no plan, no course built in advance. $9,000 in a week. Not because she forced anything. Because she finally stopped.
The difference between using Human Design and living it
[00:10:06 — 00:10:45]
There’s a version of Human Design that’s mental — you know your type, your profile, your “it factor,” and you use it to inform your content strategy. Iva used it that way for years. It works on that level, she says. But it’s not the same as feeling it from inside your body.
The shift is from doing Human Design to being it. From “this is my it factor, I’ll show it through my content” to “there is a pull in my body right now, something that wants to move, and I’m going to follow it without needing to understand why.” That second version is what changed everything for her. Not the knowledge. The embodiment.
And that, she says, is exactly what the title of your book means. Being is not passive. It’s not the absence of doing. It’s the condition from which the right doing becomes possible — and feels completely different from the inside.
The fear gate, goal trauma, and EFT tapping
[00:15:50 — 00:22:25]
Human Design gave Iva a map, but the map also showed her the blocks. Gate 44 in her spleen center — the fear of the past repeating itself. In business, this translates directly: every time you’ve set a goal and missed it, every time something went badly, you carry that unprocessed experience forward. It becomes a weight on every future attempt. She calls it goal trauma.
She survived two wars. Lost her father at 12. There was, she says simply, a lot of stuff there. And Human Design helped her see exactly where those experiences were living in her energetic structure and why they were creating specific patterns in her business behavior.
The tool she used to clear it: EFT tapping. Not as a concept, as a daily practice. In EFT, you go through a round of venting first — all the swear words, all the “this is not fair,” all of it — and only after the emotion is fully expressed does the neutralization become possible. This is precisely what Human Design prescribes for emotional authority: act from neutrality. But you can’t get to neutrality by thinking your way there. You have to move through the emotion somatically, not manage it mentally.
The plane above the hurricane
[00:25:34 — 00:27:10]
Iva described a moment that I found precise enough to keep exactly as she said it. She’d received bad news. She was spiraling. She started pacing around her kitchen doing circular breathwork — the conscious connected breath she’d learned from a coach. Within 90 seconds — the time it takes an emotion to leave the body if you don’t cling to it — something shifted.
Before: a plane in the hurricane. After: a plane above it. The clouds are still there. The difficult situation hasn’t changed. But her emotional state is completely neutral. Detached. Able to observe. And from that place, she can actually think.
This is not a metaphor for bypassing. It’s the opposite. You go through the emotion with the breath, not around it. The nervous system regulation opens the parts of the brain that dysregulation shuts down. Creativity, discernment, decision-making — all of it comes back online. And this, she says, is the only state from which you can make good decisions. Because all of your resources are available.
Why breath is the tool nobody teaches us
[00:23:59 — 00:27:27]
Both of us said the same thing in different words: the breath is a superpower and nobody teaches us this. It should be in schools. It takes three minutes, works on the vagus nerve, regulates the nervous system, and costs nothing.
I added my own version: I wake up sometimes with a contraction right here, between the solar plexus and the heart, in the sternum. Three minutes of alternate nostril breathing and it’s gone. Not suppressed — gone. And from there I can start my emails, my sessions, my day, from somewhere that actually feels like me.
Iva’s version is sharper: procrastination, bad decisions, fear and doubt — all of these come from a dysregulated nervous system. Regulate it, and everything else gets easier. Not because the problems disappear, but because you’re meeting them with all of your capacity rather than a fraction of it.
Mirror work, radical self-acceptance, and the face that doesn’t lie
[00:32:54 — 00:34:14]
Iva’s other practice is mirror work. She started it practically by necessity — living alone in Toronto, sometimes weeks without seeing anyone in person, she started talking to herself in the mirror. Dancing with herself. And from that came something she hadn’t expected: radical self-honesty.
Your eyes don’t lie. Your face doesn’t lie. You can tell yourself whatever story you want, but when you look at yourself — really look — your face tells you what’s actually true.
I shared my own version of this. Last week, after the book launch, I looked at myself in the mirror. I expected to feel thrilled. I wasn’t sure what I felt. And in the mirror I saw it: deeply satisfied. Proud. And a little ashamed to admit it, because there’s something in us that hesitates to claim satisfaction outright, like we’re not supposed to be pleased with ourselves. The mirror caught it before I could qualify it. That recognition, Iva says, changes something in the cells. I believe her.
Human Design as a certification to be yourself
[00:31:01 — 00:32:00]
One of the lines from this conversation that I keep turning over: Human Design gives you permission — a certification, she called it — to be yourself. To stop comparing your energy, your rhythm, your pace to someone else’s and wondering why you can’t keep up.
She has an undefined root center. Not consistently driven. A homebody by nature. She loves what she calls soft business — no hustle, no burning through energy in ways that deplete. Someone else, with a defined root center, thrives on exactly that intensity. Neither is wrong. But knowing which one you are, and stopping the shame about it, is the beginning of everything.
Comparison, she says, can be the thief of joy. But it can also be a source of it — when you use it as information rather than judgment. When you watch someone else’s system and recognize: she has this and I don’t. This path is hers, not mine. And from that recognition, you stop borrowing blueprints and start building from your own design.
What being actually produces
[00:53:22 — 00:55:51]
Iva closed the conversation with something I want to keep as a kind of compass. She said: when you start from being — when you start with your nervous system, with honoring yourself, with that foundation — everything else comes from that. The launch becomes easier. The content ideas keep coming because you’re in a creative state. The offers take shape because you know what you actually want. And on top of that, all the tools and tactics and strategies fit — because there’s a real foundation under them.
The version that doesn’t work: you start with the strategy, the launch plan, the marketing calendar, and try to find the energy to execute it from a system that’s already dysregulated. The doing is all there. The being is absent. And it feels like exactly what it is: pushing.
She said something else at the end that stayed with me: with AI changing faster than social media algorithms used to, we need a nervous system that can shift fast. We need to be able to make aligned decisions from a secure inner place — because otherwise everything we do depletes us and drives us straight into the wall. The external world is moving too fast for rigidity to work. The only stable ground is the one inside.
So here’s what I’m leaving you with:
Where in your business are you currently pushing — and underneath that push, what are you afraid would stop if you let go of the force? And what if that thing actually moved faster without it?
Follow Iva G. Biz + Human Design and her work on soft business and Human Design.
Being Is the New Doing is available on Amazon: https://a.co/d/08gxk9ct
Valérie
The Awakened Entrepreneur is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber and access to my Monthly Circle
Get full access to The Awakened Entrepreneur at demontvalerie.substack.com/subscribe